A Reader's Summer

 

It's been summer The beach people have made their way to the beach, and the river people, if they can manage it, have idled a week away beside a river. Readers have made their way back to books.

All the long year, they have suffered email and reports that must be read, exhausting Zoom calls, wasted time on YouTube videos in a vain attempt to break their boredom. There's probably been a book or two on the bedside table, but sometimes those books sit there for a week or more unopened.  The reader sighs and knows …. they are missing books.

Now it's summer, and the holidays, and it is time to give over to books.  Several simultaneously, or bang bang bang, three between Christmas and New Year. It's time to let the imagination off the leash, time to give over to a long conversation between just one person, the author, and the crowded tumult of their own thoughts, memories, feelings.  

I've had a good summer.  I started early with essays by Zadie Smith (Changing My Mind), then The Yield (hard work), and Frugal Hedonism (which I got the hang of after a while).  Inspired by Claudia Kavan's ABC show on books, I went to the library and put half a dozen books on request.  The first through was a biography of Gillian Mears, which I finished last weekend: I believe that in time, I will recover.

Around New Year, I think, I started on Rewilding the Urban Soul: searching for the wild in the city, by Claire Dunn.  The title indicates the ambition.  I'd be happy with Rewilding the Urban, or just Rewilding, but it is true to its promise.  Each chapter opens a door to the wild. It’s written from the flesh of the thing: at some point in most chapters, I cried or cried out, surprised by her audacity and her honest speaking.

Pretty soon into the book, I settled into the rhythm of reading a chapter in the morning, after waking, in bed with my cup of tea. Then I would take a first walk in the garden, to let the chapter ricochet around me.

It’s now late January, and my working year has begun. I'm polishing a draft report and writing a bid for a project I care a lot about. I have moved on to other reading, but I still have a few precious chapters of Claire’s book to eke out, and I want to hold onto the spirit of summer. Read a chapter. 

Walk out into the valley.  

Feel your life.

Isn't that what summer is about?

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com
20/01/22

 

On the mid-slopes

We were tipped out of covid straight into Glasgow and the climate change conference. I was ready for the liberty of moving around as I pleased for a while, and doing some shopping in Melbourne, but here I was, hurried along by news and commentary to the next crisis. Survive a pandemic, and it’s back to saving the planet.

I was sceptical of what might be conjured out of slippery politicians and a world economy set in its ways, but when a friend emailed me a link to David Attenborough’s speech, I hit the link. Dear old Attenborough ascends the stage. How many times has he done this, with that rising inflection in his voice, that urgency? How long before we connect the dots and act?

David Attenborough speaks at the start of #COP26

His speech was an elaborate media event, with backing audio track and simultaneous video screens that layered data and reportage. Ordinary citizens faced the camera and said what they felt, what they wanted. With each heartfelt plea, I felt a flush of hopefulness, but it quickly drained away.

The ‘Yes we can!’ fervour was wearing me down. It’s not that we don’t need to act, but a bit of sadness would make for a more complete picture of humans in 2021, alongside this insistent drumming up of belief in ourselves as a species.

What would I have said, I wondered, in 5 seconds with the camera? Something like: ‘I will do what I can, but my heart is aching at what we have lost – time, species, wonderful natural places. It’s hard to bear, and hard to act when grief gets a grip.’

As the world argued over targets and resolutions, I walked into Barrm Birrm and found my way to the mid-slopes. It was a warm afternoon. The lomandra was in flower, along with more murnong than I remember seeing in previous years. The grasses ran away under the trees and the sun slanted across the hillside. The currawong sent its long looping cry into the valley. 

The mid-slopes of Barrm Birrm, Spring afternoon

Can Country speak to a whitefella, the way it once used to the people who managed this land? Can we get a little less human-centric in the way we see the place we live? I know we’re the problem, and the solution, but what about other voices? What does the bush have to say?

I stood and listened. I waited. I thought about parts per million ticking steadily higher and coking coal being shipped in long trains to ports in marginal Queensland electorates.

‘Shush’ said the grasses, and left me standing quiet in the sunshine.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com

One mystery solved

7th October

Our Landcare group has made good progress in clearing the gorse and bluebell creeper from the northern corner of Barrm Birrm. Surrounded by property owners who are letting these two weeds run loose on their properties, this is a holding operation that will need attention yearly, but it’s a joy to be out in the Spring, doing something useful instead of fretting about the state of the world.

The Booths cutting and painting gorse regrowth

The acacias are finished, but now it is time for the Slender Bitter-pea (Daviesia leptophylla), yellow and orange flowers spreading across the mid slopes on a nondescript plant that is suddenly everywhere and vibrant with colour. And the Love Creeper is winding its tendrils up around anything it can find and blooming a soft blue.

Slender Bitter Pea in bloom on the mid slopes of Barrm Birrm

The gates put up by Council on the public roads into Barrm Birrm seem to be working! If you know the terrain, it’s easy enough to drive in on other tracks, but the gates are slowing the tide of opportunistic 4WDs.

It is a constant source of bewilderment to visitors that this bushland is actually private land, subdivided in the 1880s (in an office in London I’ve been told!) into 165 allotments ranging in size from 0.3 hectares to 5.2 hectares. The land was sold off in the 1970s to people who hoped one day to be able to build. That won’t happen: the land can’t handle 165 septic systems, and the bush is now a rare and wonderful place to enjoy the natural world.

The Shire has named Barrm Birrm a valued asset in its Biodiversity Strategy, and the land has recently been listed by the Catchment Management Authority in its prospectus of worthwhile projects awaiting government funding.

Just how Barrm Birrm will be returned to public ownership remains a mystery, but at least another mystery has been solved. Last Clean Up Australia day, as we scoured the hillside for rubbish, the favoured party places of Barrm Birrm were miraculously clear of broken bottles and cans. We wondered at the sudden change: had the party boys somehow turned responsible?

Slim pickings at 2021 Clean Up Australia day

Now another explanation has appeared. A dancer staying at my place has been up there, clearing the ground in order to dance freely in the middle of the bush, on those big cleared areas. One mystery solved.

You’ll be dancing too, if make your way to Barrm Birrm and find the chocolate lilies and dianella, coming into bloom in late October.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com

Not so simple Spring

6th September 2021

Spring is the simple season. It says ‘Grow’. It says: breakout, bud and flower, push to the light that lengthens each day, go to the warmth. Don’t mind the reversals to cold weather, keep going. Grow! That frisky feeling, that’s Spring – make the most of it!

Our times are not so simple. We are locked in, so don’t go out, don’t stretch your fingers toward others. And with the warm weather starting so soon in the year, beware of summer, advancing in increments, bearing we do not know what fate. In this particular rotation around the sun, we have learned that what we thought was normal is set about with assumptions we had not noticed until they were upended.

Blackwood in bloom

Still, it’s Spring, and I am amazed. The acacia dealbata is already on the wane, but here beside it is a fine-leafed acacia whose name I don’t know about to burst into flower, golden yellow licking up the plant like a new fire in dry kindling. In the Blackwoods, the big buds of flower are out, a restrained yellow you could say except that the whole of the plant is bursting, every branch, from top to bottom, an excitation of flowers. The Blackwood is an unobtrusive tree of modest stature, but it sure knows how to flower.

This morning, I went looking for Ovens Valley wattle I had seen yesterday in Barrm Birrm. Along one of the lateral tracks then up, here, just here, through this band of Prickly Moses, here they are, wending their way from the damp country above the cemetery, spreading steadily along the slope. Cascades of pale yellow, but, my deep apologies living plant, you are not from here. I must bid you adieu with the short sharp pruning saw that sits on my hip.

A small Ovens Valley Wattle

Deceased Ovens Valley Wattle, and check that monster in the distance behind it

 A few months ago, our Landcare group looked at our term deposit and decided there were better things it could be doing than earning almost no interest. We engaged contractors to poison the exotic wattles in Barrm Birrm, and in a sweep from the northern end, they made it almost to the cemetery. I’m out mopping up the stragglers.

After that, we will hold that line, year by year, each not so simple Spring, walking gently through the bush, eyes alert for the flare of yellow that shows the young seedlings, ready to discourage them …. with a firm tug that bares the roots.  

Easy to pull out when they are small

 Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com